


Home (is always with you)

by IraBragi



Series: Building Home [7]
Category: Batman - All Media Types
Genre: Backstory, Gen, M/M, getting out of bad places and finding somewhere better, introspective, mentions thinking about suicide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-29
Updated: 2017-11-29
Packaged: 2019-02-08 06:38:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 616
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12858915
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/IraBragi/pseuds/IraBragi





	Home (is always with you)

When I was a child home was four walls and the truth that the five people I shared them with were the only ones who would miss me if I just… stopped.  And books.  There were nights that I think I my apathy towards breathing might have won if it weren’t for the stories that I still wanted to finish.

When I was nineteen I left that house.  They tell you that love builds a home, what they forgot to add is that it also takes money and a willingness to agree on who picks up the socks.

If there was one thing that Gotham has plenty of, it’s crappy apartments.  I think that over the next few years I lived in every single one of them.

Wayne Manor was never my home, but it was a home and I loved it there because it reminded me of things that I thought I’d forgotten.

Jason had six safe houses in the city, five more around the country, and a handful around the world.  Somehow he still ended up sleeping on my couch (and then my bed) more nights than not.

When he showed me his place (“It’s my oldest safehouse, I don’t think even Dick knows this one!”) I thought that it fit him.  Books and swords, bloody clothes in a hamper and ingredients in the pantry.  Grayson showed up right about the time we got our clothes off.  Brothers just have good timing like that.

We argued about living together.  Jason wanted me safe, I wanted to live somewhere for longer than a few weeks, to have a _home_ not a disposable safehouse.  Eventually we realized that, whether we admitted it or not, we ended up in the same bed most nights so we should really sit down and figure things out.  

(Well more accurately, I went to sleep in the bed, Jason came in from patrol around dawn and curled around me until the nightmares woke us both up and we got up to fix coffey and glare at the rising sun.)

The first time I brought a kid home to patch up Jason flipped out.  Security protocols and spies and such.  I glared and asked if there was a security protocol for paranoia.  Or maybe he’d rather just lock me up in the basement, surely I’d be safer there? (I really need to remember that none of the robins, past or present, understand sarcasm.  Also get a picture of Jason’s horrified spluttering and protests of “I’d never!”)

It took time but we worked it out.  

Harley got it in her head that I was operating a free vet clinic.  Tim never would admit it, but he likes the tea I make him drink.  Bruce is still prone to near fatal bullet exposure.  Red Hood has never met a gang dispute that he doesn't try to mediate (usually by outshooting everyone else.)

A bloodstained sofa, half a mountain of books, chipped coffee mugs, and way too many weapons to even start to count shouldn’t feel like home - but it does.  

Eventually I’ve come to realize that it’s not simply “love” that makes a home - It’s finding someone whose life fits beside yours.  

It’s choosing to work out how to keep from driving each other crazy because, crazy or not, you can’t imagine not waking up next to them.  It’s letting someone see you at your lowest, your most broken, because you have faith that they will still be on the other side of the storm.  It’s never feeling trapped and always knowing whose turn it is to take out the trash (and always finding a reason why it isn’t your’s.)

Home is with him.


End file.
